Cybernaut

My online banking tirade

Without naming names, let’s say I keep all my accounts at a
certain Whistler bank branch. I used to bank at different financial
institutions in Ontario and Nova Scotia, then opened a new account at another
bank when I arrived in Whistler in 1999. Last year I moved banks once again
when my wife and I pooled our resources.

Now all of our accounts — mortgage, chequing, savings,
RRSPs, line of credit — exist at a single bank. All of our apples are in
one basket, so to speak.

I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing — it’s one of the
biggest banks in Canada and would be one of the last to go under in a financial
catastrophe. Besides, we owe them ten times more than we have in all our
accounts.

What is bad is that this particular apple basket completely
sucks when it comes to online banking, which is really the only kind of banking
that I do.

For one thing, there’s no way to use the information presented
online to figure out how much money you had at the start of the month or the
end of the month — unless you always look at your account on the first and last
of the month and write that information down somewhere else. Unlike the two
previous banks I’ve banked with online, this particular financial institution
does not show your balance after every single transaction you make — which
means there’s no looking backwards to find out what your balance was after any
given transaction, which means I have no frame of reference to track our
finances online.

Cheques come in, money goes out, and we never have the
slightest idea what any of it really means. In order to track our accounts and
keep to any kind of a budget it looks like we will actually have to start
keeping an entirely separate set of books.

I’ve complained about the lack of a balance column a number of
times, and in reply I’ve been fed a line of B.S. about how electronic balances
and actual balances can differ sometimes and was advised to refer to our paper
statement to get accurate balance information — which also doesn’t tell us the
exact information we need to know, when we need to know it. Besides, we’d much
prefer to go paperless and stop getting mail altogether.

What the bank couldn’t explain is why other banks can in fact
give you an accurate, instant electronic balance after every single transaction
you make. It’s just a simple matter for banks to get their website servers to
talk to their central computer servers which do track your transactions in
real-time.